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Wi Flag (2002)

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Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#161

Post by jdk »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #158
jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

Any insight you could share on why the server didn’t end up being provided to the community for self-hosting?

I had been gone from Turbine for 8 or 10 years by the time they decided to shut AC down, so I can only speculate. I assume it had something to do with WB not wanting to "give away" the IP but instead just lock it away in a vault.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#162

Post by TeMPOraL »

marcosdumay wrote: post #91
shadowgovt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite things in gaming is when lore develops from bugs. When they added the ability for Kerbals to be killed in Kerbal Space Program, they tripped over a bug where the first Kerbal in the game's engine, Jebediah (the one who dated back to the original introduction of astronauts at all, where only one existed), could not be killed. Because of some of the game logic having gone unmodified from the earlier…

The KSP community has lore about the Kraken. They will joke about anything.

The Kraken is a great example indeed. An eldritch horror lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system, that is not fond of Kerbals who are too ambitious, trying to get too far, too fast. A cosmic being beyond understanding. You can't see it and will never know where it is, if the concept of being in a place even applies to it. All you can know is that, as you travel further and further out, one day you may notice the laws of nature start to change, and this means the Kraken is about to have you for dinner. And sometimes, if it spots you doing something you shouldn't be, it will reach out even all the way to your home world and consume you there.

When it strikes, it eats you swiftly, and eats you whole. It disassembles your crafts, spaghettifies your crews. No weapon or speech will save you. The Kraken transcends reality - even time travel, reloading from a saved game state, does not always stop the attack.

--

Of course, the Kraken is just a manifestation of unstable physics calculations and a floating point-based coordinate system: as you travel further out, the spacing between two consecutive coordinates gets bigger, until it overwhelms the physics engine and your craft disintegrates. And if you start doing crazy stunts, particularly involving high impulses or very fast rotations, the physics will break even if you're close to coordinate origin, due to rounding errors.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#163

Post by jdk »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #157
jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

> IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point Any idea how the targeting algorithm was chosen? It does not behave the way this letter says that it should.

Nope, it was before my time. I joined the team in beta.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#164

Post by [deleted] »

yvdriess wrote: post #146
jdk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly c…

Another "grew up playing AC" here and fondly remember interacting with Bael'Zharon on the Harvestgain server during the life events. Did you also blow up Arwic? :D I still use AC and to some extent AC2 as an example of how wild, weird, dynamic and interesting MMOs were before the EQ formula won through WoW's success.

[deleted]

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#165

Post by thaumasiotes »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #123
kypro wrote: post #82

What am I missing here? Unless all the devs were really bad at maths (unlikely if they're game devs) then this seems like a really easy bug to find all things considered? I thought maybe it was going to be some weird DB glitch or something far upstream from the algorithm selecting which player to attack, but it was literally the logic of the very algorithm you would first look at if you were aware of such an issue. T…

Yes I came to post exactly this, and found your comment, so will reply instead. The bug doesn't seem to be obscure. It is there in the right place. Someone thinking about checking "why some players are attacked more often?" would probably choose this as the first place to double check, since it is directly related to selecting the player for attack. Maybe the most occult part of this is figuring out that the unique I…

> The bug doesn't seem to be obscure. It is there in the right place.

Well, there is a larger bug -- the entire algorithm, functioning properly, still won't behave the way this letter says that it should. It's not clear what it's designed to do, but it's very obvious that it doesn't do what the description says it does.

Did nobody ever notice that?

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#166

Post by TeMPOraL »

iamdbtoo wrote: post #13
veilrap wrote: post #5

I love the "lore" that this sort of bug creates, especially in these sorts of large scale multiplayer environments. Players claiming to be cursed, and the curse was real! A very different sort of event that it reminds me of is the old World of Warcraft plague: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

My theory for why people think they are being "shadowbanned" or otherwise targeted by a social media company is often because of bugs like this. They are weird and almost like gaslighting in the way you experience them and people who don't understand how these bugs can exist assume sinister motives.

I remember Facebook around ~2010 would often seemingly delete posts I published, or hide them from some of my friends. Or from me. I could easily confirm that by viewing my profile from another browser that wasn't logged in, or having a friend sitting next to me open my profile.

Of course, it wasn't any kind of UI bug or automated moderation. The experience gave me a visceral understanding of what eventual consistency means - a term I also first learned around that time, during internship in an Erlang company, and connected the dots.

I was one of the first people in my social circle to spot the issue, but as it became apparent over a year or two before eventually getting fixed (or at least made less obvious), I ended up giving a very high level intro to distributed databases to quite a few non-tech people, in order to alleviate their concerns about Facebook gremlins.

This and other experiences using and building software systems make me agree with you. Especially for large web platforms, that weird thing you're experiencing could be some nasty form of shadow ban, but if you just noticed it after doing something, then chances are it's just a transient issue with queues or database consistency.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#167

Post by stavros »

rcfox wrote: post #77
anyfoo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After I (happily!) did their work for them, a simple "thank you", or even an acknowledgment through a closed ticket, would have entirely sufficed to make my day.

Back when Stack Overflow was in beta, the original design was really rough, so I mocked up a suggested new design for the main page via Stylish and submitted it to them. Within a day or two, they adopted something almost identical but never acknowledged me. One could argue it was a pretty basic idea (I only spent around 15 minutes on it myself) and they probably arrived there independently, but I still like to believ…

Back when reddit was good, I was a moderator of a pretty large subreddit. One April Fools' day, I decided that, as a joke, I'd edit my subreddit's CSS to show the "reddit is down" image over of the home page. I did that, and, a few minutes later, reddit was actually down.

One could argue it was a coincidence, but I still like to believe that I influenced a major site's uptime. Mostly because they told me I crashed the site and asked me not to play any more jokes like that again.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#168

Post by kadoban »

tablespoon wrote: post #136
30minAdayHN wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they lacked decency and intellectual humility to acknowledge his email despite benefiting from it.

> Because they lacked decency and intellectual humility to acknowledge his email despite benefiting from it. Or their internal communication was haphazard and not designed to handle this case. I could totally imagine the bug report getting passed informally through a game of telephone and losing the connection to the external reporter (e.g. at some point the report got paraphrased, so the developer who fixed it doesn…

Which is why you should immediately answer "thanks, we'll look into it!", then at least they got something even if you forget later. I learned this as a the triage guy in one of my first jobs, as I have a very shit memory.

Worst case you thank someone for something useless.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#169

Post by munificent »

bob1029 wrote: post #51
loganc2342 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MMOs are just so expensive to develop now that innovation is almost dead. You either make a WoW-like or you die (and many times you die anyway). They really don’t make MMOs like they used to.

> MMOs are just so expensive to develop now that innovation is almost dead. I look at this differently. I think the extreme cost of an MMO should force innovation. Take the constraints for what they are and run with them. Accepting that you can't do it the "traditional" way is the first step to figuring out a better way. There is nothing that says a high-quality WoW killer absolutely must cost 10 figures to produce.

Social media apps : MMOS :: Reality TV : Fiction television shows

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#170

Post by rapind »

PolyphonyReq wrote: post #149
jdk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the last 15 years or so, coworkers ask when I'm going to make a new allegiance system but "less broken". So many good social behaviors came from its structure that it really deserves another attempt. And yeah, Ash Gromnies were the bane of so so so many players.

What do you see as the major flaws and what do you think you would do differently?

It eventually ended up being a straight line where you could add yourself lower and higher in the line with two different characters, and turbo feed the xp upwards (there were loyalty stats to push up and receive more xp). It peaked with a prevalence of bots that would be parked at the bottom feeding the line 24/7.

Loved AC. Bots kind of killed it IMO (something I feel bad about contributing to), but also new MMOs (WoW decimated the competition when it came out). I remember a portal / recall trick with two vendors, where one would sell a specific thing cheaper than the other would buy it. This was before eBay cracked down on virtual goods. Interesting times.

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